Circe's Swine: Plays by Gorky and O'Neill

Muchnic, Helen

doi:10.2307/1768706

Cited by 4 publications

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Maxim Gorky: Living and Writing Protest

Peterson¹

2019

A Companion to World Literature

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Officially proclaimed “the father of Soviet literature,” Maxim Gorky's celebrity has obscured the complexity of the man and his writing. A self‐taught writer, he fashioned an image of himself as a romantic rebel in stories about vagabonds and scofflaws. The future revolutionary was initially infatuated with Nietzsche; his fiction featured men of vital force. Impatient with a peasant culture embedded in passivity and sporadic violence, Gorky was drawn toward the discipline and zeal of the Bolsheviks. Gorky's art, particularly his drama under Chekhov's tutelage, took shape as a protest against the suffocating conventionality of tsarist Russia. In his best work, Gorky “colonized” Russian drama and fiction with the authentic language and perspective of the underclass. His imprint is evident in works by O'Neill and Richard Wright. Gorky's fear of anarchy led him to become a militant custodian of world culture. An opponent of repression, he saved many lives and careers from persecution. But when the Soviet state was under threat, Gorky excused some of the worst excesses of Stalinist tyranny.

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Maxim Gorky: Living and Writing Protest

Peterson¹

2019

A Companion to World Literature

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Jean Anouilh and Eugene O'Neill: Repetition as Negativity

Moleski¹,

Stroupe²

1986

Comparative Drama

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Revolution in The Iceman Cometh

Frazer¹

1979

Modern Drama

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A POETIC LINE-"The days grow hot, 0 Babylon! 'Tis cool beneath thy willow trees!"-is repeated with variations some dozen times in The Iceman Cometh by the anarchist character Hugo Kalmar. Biographers and critics of O'Neill have failed to note the origin of this important thematic line which reinforces the connotation of the title, wherein the warm, loving bridegroom of the Bible is replaced by the cold, profane iceman of death. The absence of comment might make one wonder if the playwright made up the line and its variations himself, were it not for the fact that they appear in quotation marks and are designated as "Hugo's favorite quotation."

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Circe's Swine: Plays by Gorky and O'Neill

Cited by 4 publications

References 0 publications

Maxim Gorky: Living and Writing Protest

Maxim Gorky: Living and Writing Protest

Jean Anouilh and Eugene O'Neill: Repetition as Negativity

Revolution in The Iceman Cometh

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